The No BS President?

I just finished reading President Obama's interview in Rolling Stone magazine and I have to say, I continue to be impressed with him overall.

I know there are some in this country that hate all democrats just because they're democrats. I think that attitude is very nihilistic. I didn't support Bush Jr because there were so many issues I didn't agree with his administration about. Not the least of which was his out-of-control spending and complete denial that lack of financial regulation was going to almost destroy our economy. Republican pundits say that TARP is an example of egregious spending. Obama says:

"The truth of the matter is that TARP will end up costing probably less than $100 billion, when all is said and done. Which I promise you, two years ago, you could have asked any economist and any financial expert out there, and they would have said, 'We'll take that deal.'"

$100 billion. That's 1/8 of the cost of retaining the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. I want to scream at today's republicans who have the nerve to say Obama's spending is out of control: "Where were you eight years ago?!?" Where were you when Bush and the republican led congress passed a $1 trillion prescription drug plan completely unpaid for and with an infamous doughnut hole in coverage that left many elderly facing bankruptcy to buy their medication? Where were you when Bush brought America into two wars? I don't ask, because I know. They were shivering under a blanket of fear that any day a terrorist was going to blow up a Wal-Mart in middle America. What? We could get attacked? Quick! Throw education, the elderly, our children's financial futures, and the Bill of Rights under the bus! We need to send troops to any country with muslims in it to "get the terrorists there before they get us here".

Republicans may be proud of holding up that they're the party of "Hell No!" but I think it's beyond the pale to be the party of hell no when the president is democrat and the party of rubber stamps when he's republican. Obama was asked about when he first realized that he may not get the bipartisan support he campaigned about:

Well, I'll tell you that given the state of the economy during my transition, between my election and being sworn in, our working assumption was that everybody was going to want to pull together, because there was a sizable chance that we could have a financial meltdown and the entire country could plunge into a depression. So we had to work very rapidly to try to create a combination of measures that would stop the free-fall and cauterize the job loss.

I still remember going over to the Republican caucus to meet with them and present our ideas, and to solicit ideas from them before we presented the final package. And on the way over, the caucus essentially released a statement that said, "We're going to all vote 'No' as a caucus." And this was before we'd even had the conversation. At that point, we realized that we weren't going to get the kind of cooperation we'd anticipated. The strategy the Republicans were going to pursue was one of sitting on the sidelines, trying to gum up the works, based on the assumption that given the scope and size of the recovery, the economy probably wouldn't be very good, even in 2010, and that they were better off being able to assign the blame to us than work with us to try to solve the problem.

We hear from so many pundits who make the issues our country faces seem so simple. Politicians dumb down issues to soundbites and rhetoric to appeal to the 5 second attention span of our citizens (are you still reading this?). Republican's recent "Pledge to America" is an example of this rhetoric. What will you do? Balance the budget! Control spending! Cut taxes! How? (cricket cricket cricket):

Yeah. I thought Obama said this best:

One of the things that you realize when you're in my seat is that, typically, the issues that come to my desk — there are no simple answers to them. Usually what I'm doing is operating on the basis of a bunch of probabilities: I'm looking at the best options available based on the fact that there are no easy choices. If there were easy choices, somebody else would have solved it, and it wouldn't have come to my desk.

That's true for financial regulatory reform, that's true on Afghanistan, that's true on how we deal with the terrorist threat. On all these issues, you've got a huge number of complex factors involved. When you're sitting outside and watching, you think, "Well, that sounds simple," and you can afford to operate on the basis of your ideological predispositions. What I'm trying to do — and certainly what we've tried to do in our economic team — is to keep a North Star out there: What are the core principles we're abiding by? In the economic sphere, my core principle is that America works best when you've got a growing middle class, and you've got ladders so that people who aren't yet in the middle class can aspire to the middle class, and if that broad base is rolling, then the country does well.

Read the whole interview here. You won't regret it. Unless, of course, you want to continue to hold on to your beliefs that Obama's a socialist, anti-colonialist, muslim, racist who's out to destroy the very fabric this country's built on. Then you might regret it.